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Snakes in Movies   Journey to the West (2013)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a Chinese action/adventure/fantasy/comedy from Stephen Chow, the director of Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer. It was the highest grossing film of 2013 in China. It includes a brief snake scene in which a Buddhist monk pulls the fangs out of a snake's mouth - something I haven't seen before, and hope to never see again. The central character is Xuan Zang (Zhang Wen), a young Buddhist disciple who wants to be a demon hunter but he keeps getting bested by more experienced demon hunters. Xuan helped to protect a village from a water demon, but another demon hunter swooped in at the last minute to kill it and claim the credit, and the reward. Dejected, Xuan returns to his master (Sihan Cheng) and complains that all he wants to do is destroy demons to help people. His master tells him that killing is not the best way to deal with demons and that he should never forget his beliefs are to rehabilitate demons instead of killing them. The master then pulls from a tree branch a snake that just happened to right there in the middle of town right next to him. He explains to Xuan that demons are inherently good people whose hearts turned to evil. A demon hunter's job is to remove the evil and keep only the goodness. As he talks about removing the evil, he pulls out two fangs from the snake's mouth, then puts the snake on the ground. The snake we see is clearly harmless, but we're supposed to believe it's a venomous one with fangs. The close-up of the head seems to show a live snake (if not, it's a really good fake) but the fangs that are pulled out can't be real. They had to have been somehow attached to the roof of the snake's mouth so they could be easily removed. But even though no snakes were injured in the making of this movie, it's an example of one of the terrible things ignorant people do to snakes, and something that I hope nobody tries to emulate. (I've seen someone pull out a snake's completely harmless tongue to "remove its poison" so pulling out the fangs is not that far-fetched.) Someone would probably be envenomated if they tried it, and even without its fangs, a snake's venom is still dangerous.